Diary of a Network Geek

The trials and tribulations of a Certified Novell Engineer who's been stranded in Houston, Texas.

6/30/2017

Improved Gutenberg

Filed under: Art,Fun — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is terribly early in the morning or 6:05 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waxing Crescent

Well, there goes my dastardly scheme to sell “improved” free books from Project Gutenberg!

Okay, I wasn’t seriously thinking of that, but I do know that there are people doing it. Seriously, if you go look at the cheap ebooks on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, you’ll see quite a few that are really just repackaged books taken from Project Gutenberg. Sometimes, those repackaged ebooks have improvements to them, like a nice cover or improved typography, but often, they don’t even have that. They’re just the same basic ebook that volunteers at Project Gutenberg have made from copyright free material with a poorly made, low-end “cover” attached to it. Usually, they’re not even worth the dollar or two these repackagers are asking. Now, though, they’re worth even less.
Now, there’s Standard Ebooks, which takes ebooks from sources that include Project Gutenberg, cleans up the editing, pretties up the typesetting and adds what look like much nicer “covers” and then offers them to you for free. Yes, for free! They’re relatively new, so their library of free, open-source, public domain ebooks is still growing, but their volunteers are hard at work adding more. Frankly, it seems like the perfect place to grab some classic reading for a free beach or pool-side read!

Give them a look and we’ll see you next week with something new and exciting.
Well, at least new and probably free.

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.


Powered by WordPress
Any links to sites selling any reviewed item, including but not limited to Amazon, may be affiliate links which will pay me some tiny bit of money if used to purchase the item, but this site does no paid reviews and all opinions are my own.